Probe Data Analytics (VPP Suite)

An optional component of RITIS, Probe Data Analytics (PDA) give users tremendous capabilities to evaluate system performance in support of planning, operations, research and other activities. PDA uses 3rd party probe data fused with other agency transportation data to provide a true “big data” analytics platform. These data are then leveraged by nine different apps to generate actionable data summaries, maps, graphs, charts and unique visualizations for detailed analyses and reporting. Clear, concise and easy-to-understand results are also perfect for publishing press releases for public and media consumption.

What are the worst bottlenecks?

Where is the most congestion?

Some of the benefits of using PDA include:

Enhanced real-time operations decision-making

Better work zone monitoring

Improved travel time and reliability analysis

More robust After Action Reviews

Comprehensive problem identification

Cost-effective project/program prioritization

Improved Before & After Studies

Extensive system performance reporting capabilities

Demonstrate the economic impacts of user delay

Fully compliant with MAP-21 reporting requirements

How did that storm impact travel, compared to other normal days?

To help facilitate PDA use and improve features and functionality, a User Group was formed in 2012. The group is comprised of “power users” from Coalition membership with demonstrated skills in using PDA in effective and creative ways. The group meets quarterly to share unique PDA uses, exchange ideas and work collaboratively with the developers to ensure PDA apps meet current and future needs.

The Probe Data Analytics Forum is a “User Hub” developed for agencies using the RITIS platform’s PDA apps. Use this site for posting and sharing information and attachments – like Agency Press Releases, Agency Use Cases and Tutorials – that helps make PDA use easier and more effective. You can hold technical discussions, participate in User Groups and in general coordinate and collaborate in a “one-stop shop” fashion on any and all things PDA!

Using the Probe Data Analytics Forum will make your PDA use and the products you develop smarter and better; ultimately saving you and your organization time, money and effort.

It’s easy to become a member – just click here, then click on Register in the upper right hand corner of the Probe Data Analytics Forum home page, and you’ll be up and running in no time!

Open & Transparent: There are no “black boxes” with RITIS — all formulae used to calculate metrics are available for users to review. And to the extent possible, we’ve built in capabilities so that agency transportation engineers, academics, and FHWA partners may define their own criteria to satisfy local needs.

Agency Guided: RITIS enhancements and new features are continually guided by agencies through Agency Input Sessions in regularly scheduled RITIS and Probe Data Analytics Suite User Groups, as well as suggestions, comments and questions sent to our Support Team. This has ensured that user interfaces, output formats, and visualizations reflect agency priorities and needs.

Data Agnostic: RITIS tools can ingest nearly any type of data in any format. Our probe data analytics tools work with any 3rd party probe data provider (HERE, INRIX, or TomTom.) If an agency decides later to change their ATMS, ITS technologies, or data provider, rest assured that historic data will be preserved—providing seamless analysis between data providers and time ranges.

Tailored for Inter-Agency Collaboration: There is great value to “seeing” across jurisdictional boundaries. For daily operations, significant events, and regional emergencies, coordination improves when everyone has access to a single, trusted source of information. Dedicated preparedness and collaboration tools built into RITIS help agency and responder staffs plan, train, execute, and review together.

Shared Development & Pooled Fund Projects: When one agency invests in a new feature or technology, the products are shared so all other RITIS agencies can benefit. By leveraging each other’s investments, agencies accomplish more with less while helping the system to evolve.

Maintained and Improved by a Large Professional Support Team: RITIS is developed and supported by an unparalleled interdisciplinary team of graphic artists, UX specialists, transportation professionals, IT staff, software developers, and agency partners, making it a powerful national asset.

A high-level tutorial video can be found here. However, below are a series of screenshots on some of the more prevalent features.

Time and Location Selections

Probe Data Analytics has a series of extremely robust filtering capabilities that let you choose the exact location for which you want to perform your analysis. Users can select any level of geography for analysis – from a single segment in a single direction of travel to every single county of multiple states. Users can also select Regions (state and counties), by zip codes and for specific road classes. Complex road selections can be saved for quick and easy retrieval.

Similarly, you can select a single day, multiple days, months, years, etc. for which you want to analyze. You can even select only certain days of the week throughout a date range, or even only certain hours of certain days (Example: morning rush hours on weekdays only).

Region Explorer

Region explorer shows the relationships between bottlenecks and traffic events and their impacts on traffic conditions both in real-time or at previous points in the past. It is primarily map-based, providing a geospatial context for the data being presented. A ranked list of real-time or point-in-time bottlenecks is shown beside the map, and each element (bottleneck, travel time reading, and/or accident) can be clicked on to bring up additional details, stats, etc. Additionally, historic weather radar data can be viewed.

Massive Raw Data Downloader

All of the raw probe speed data (from any 3rd party provider) can be downloaded using the Massive Raw Data Downloader. This gives the user the ability to do offline, detailed analyses or integrate this raw data into their own applications

Congestion Scan

Congestion Scan lets you analyze traffic conditions on a contiguous stretch of road. If you choose to analyze a single day, traffic events and incidents will also be plotted on the road to help determine causality of the congestion. The congestion scan will also allow you to average multiple days’, months’, or years’ worth of traffic onto a single congestion scan. You can also visualize different time periods side-by-side, invaluable for analyzing impacts of work zones, major events or incidents. You can also do multi-road scans, to congestion impacts along a travel corridor, such as a major commuter or recreational route. The data behind each congestion scan (and all of the other tools in the suite) can be easily exported to Excel—pre-formatted for easy analysis and recreation of specific visualization.

Figure 3: Congestion and other measures can be visualized in both directions of travel along a corridor. Accident and event data can be overlaid on the congestion scan to help determine causality.

Figure 4: The Congestion Scan tool allows for detailed zooming, cropping, and custom display configurations for each of its graphs.

Figure 5: Display multiple date ranges on each scan. This is useful for before and after studies of the impacts of construction projects.

Trend Map

Trends map produces animations of roadway performance over time, dynamically displaying changes in speeds, congestion and a number of other measures. With Trend Map, you can choose to analyze a single time period, or multiple time periods, displaying them side-by-side to compare and contrast for any scenarios you choose (weekend vs weekday; seasonal variation; before, during and after events; etc.) There are a number of options at your disposal, such as setting color thresholds, map layouts and displaying traffic events. You can save the results as an Excel file, screenshots and animated GIFs or MP4 movies – great for making highly-informative presentations. And you can even create embed code with the click of a button to add animations into your organization’s website.

Figure 7: Up to seven maps can be drawn and animated simultaneously with the Trend map tool.

Performance Charts

Performance Charts are bar, line, scatter plot, and candlestick charts representing aggregate conditions across stretches of road. The charts can be grouped by time period or by road directionality. The currently available performance metrics include:

Speeds

Travel Times

Travel time index

Planning Time

Planning Time index

Buffer Time

Buffer Time Index

Comparative Speed

Congestion

Historic Averages for the above

Figure 9: Screenshot of metric selections and display modes in the performance charts.

For each of the above metrics, the user can overlay multiple locations and/or time-ranges for easy comparison. 5th/95th and 25th/75th percentile measurements can also be displayed or hidden with the click of a button.

Figure 10: In this screenshot, average speeds along a stretch of I-270 in Maryland are displayed (dark line), while the 25/75th percentiles are shown in dark gray, and the 5th/95th percentile speeds are shown in light gray.

Performance Summaries

Performance Summaries produce several different tables of metrics grouped by day of week, weekdays, and weekends. The results can be compiled for every hour of the day or for specific time ranges, such as AM and PM peak hours. The reports are grouped by road direction.

Figure 11: Performance summary results for both the morning and afternoon rush hours on I-270.

Bottleneck Ranking

Bottleneck Ranking allows you to identify, rank and explore bottleneck locations on a roadway. The results are presented in a table, a map, and a series of other visualizations with statistics on each bottleneck location, such as overall rank, impact, average max length and daily duration and total duration, as well as all events/incidents that occurred within the space of the bottleneck at any time during the time period being analyzed.

Selecting a bottleneck location from the table will recenter the map on the relevant location, and the adjacent spiral timeline or line chart will be updated to depict when the location was bottlenecked. Checkboxes on the bottom of the map panel allow you to disable the “highlighting” of the selected bottleneck and turn on or off the ranking numbers next to each map icon. The bottleneck times can be viewed in a table which can also be exported to Excel.

The timeline and line charts in the lower right can be used to determine the temporal patters of congestion. For example, some locations may only become congested during the morning rush hours or the evening rush hours. Event (accident and construction) data on top of these graphics helps to determine congestion.

Clicking on any element in the resulting table, time spiral graph, or line charts will open up congestion scans for each congestion event and/or draw an incident timeline graphic depicting the event.

User Delay Cost Analytics

User Delay Cost (UDC) Analysis combines probe speed data with volume data provided by the Texas Transportation Institute and/or individual agency volume data to estimate the cost of delay experienced by drivers as a result of congestion. Default values of commercial and passenger vehicle costs are provided, or you can adjust based on your own information. You can also adjust the percentages of passenger and commercial vehicles.

Users can define when delay should be calculated based on the following options:

Historic Average Speeds: Calculate delay anytime a segment falls below historic average conditions. You can even define how far below historic average you must be before you begin computing delay:

The UDC supplements agency cost analyses related to roadway improvements, impacts of work zones and other conditions.

Figure 12: A zoomed in screenshot of user delay costs estimates for stretch of the Capital Beltway in Washington D.C. The exceedingly high UDC costs on January 6th in the morning rush hours were the result of a major snow event.

Dashboards

Dashboard allows users to custom build their own personal dashboard of “widgets.” Users can determine which geographies (single corridor from any starting and ending point, multiple corridors, counties, states, etc.) and date ranges (current compared to average, current compared to last year, month-to-date, week-to-date, etc.) are included in their individual widgets. Existing widgets display speed and travel time and bottleneck ranking and have several options for displaying information.

Future versions of the dashboard will be sharable and/or embeddable within your own agency’s website for quick and easy sharing with the public or other decision makers. When the final MAP-21 rules are released, a version of this dashboard will be made available that is tailored to the MAP-21 reporting requirements.

“Analysis that used to take an entire year to accomplish with one or two full-time employees now takes only 10-minutes, and I don’t need an entire IT staff to support it.” ~MPO Senior Transportation Analyst

“PDA represents a quantum leap in capabilities for problem identification, problem confirmation, and communicating with the public.” ~DOT Planner

“The amount of funding we have to ask for from our DOT program manager has decreased as a result of access to these tools. They are saving money, and we are more nimble.” ~DOT Consultant

“We are making better informed decisions about which ops centers to keep open, where to deploy patrols, and what type of economic impact we are having on the traveling public. We’ve never had this type of insight into operations before.” ~DOT Operations Manager

“Someone finally understands how to display operations data in a way that makes sense and doesn’t make me rely on 10 different systems on 5 different computer terminals. And it’s fast! I’m simply blown away!” ~Center Operations Engineer

“This is amazing! We can tell some really compelling stories to the public about our impact, and it’s so easy!” ~Private Sector Public Information Officer and Media Relations for a DOT

Description: On January 2, 2018, a “Bomb Cyclone” Nor’easter formed, that severely impacted the southeastern US, the Northeast, New England and Atlantic Canada. There were top wind speeds of 90 mph with the highest gust of 126 mph , Max. of 24 in of snowfall and 0.5 in of ice, 300,000 power outages and 22 confirmed fatalities.

Highlights: MATOC – Metropolitan Area Transportation Operations Coordination – instituted their Severe Weather Coordination Process, using RITIS Meeting for regional coordination and decision-making involving 100s of people. MATOC also used PDA Suite tools to evaluate the impact of the storm on area transit, roads, commuters and schools.

Description: On March 30, 2017 a bridge on I-85 north of Atlanta collapsed from an intense fire, closing all five lanes of highway in each direction for 45 days. At the June 8th RITIS User Group meeting, the CATT Lab presented how to use RITIS for: Traveler information; Real-time coordination, and; After Action Reviews. The University of Maryland’s CATT used various PDA Suite tools for a follow-up “deep-dive” analysis of the roadway network’s performance before, during and after the collapse.

Highlights: CATT researchers clearly depicted area impacts though travel time reliability visuals, and also used the data to develop a new “Comparative Congestion Index” to indicate the relative value of TTI during the road closure, compared to average TTI before and after the bridge collapse period.